


won't you please take my hand?

by leetheshark



Category: IT (1990), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Amputee Eddie Kaspbrak, Fluff, Halloween, M/M, offscreen sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-20 18:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21286286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leetheshark/pseuds/leetheshark
Summary: It’s Halloween, 1993, and Richie thinks about having kids.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 25
Kudos: 223
Collections: It Faves





	won't you please take my hand?

**Author's Note:**

> it’s a little late, but happy halloween!
> 
> based on the 1990 miniseries and the book. title is from oingo boingo’s [elevator man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDQ1rWjzgoo)
> 
> contains brief mentions of: past eating disorder, abusive parent, parent death—and a brief description of movie gore
> 
> 🎃

If Richie says so himself—and he does, to practically everyone in the studio—he absolutely _killed_ KLAD’s Halloween show. He’s still riding that high when he gets home at half past eight, to the sound of staticky wet noise and inhuman screeching coming from his living room.

He finds Eddie parked on the couch, a large bowl of candy in his lap, staring at the TV with rapt attention as a man’s severed head grows spider-legs and gets taken out by a flamethrower.

Like Richie, Eddie prefers horror movies that came out after 1960.

Richie watches Eddie tear open a packet of Skittles with his teeth and pour it one-handed into his mouth, like he sometimes does with his vitamins, and it warms Richie to see that in the past few years, Eddie’s managed to shake his unhealthy—which is to say, obsessively healthy—eating habits enough to absent-mindedly snack on Halloween candy.

He sneaks up behind Eddie, and as he leans over the back of the couch, Eddie turns his head to greet Richie with a sweet smile and a swift peck on the lips. “Hey, Rich.”

“Hey, Eds.” As Richie makes his way to the front of the couch, he notices that, sticking out of the normally empty right sleeve of Eddie’s shirt, is a plastic skeleton arm, tied in place with string.

Richie promptly drops to one knee, takes the skeleton hand, and presses a kiss into the cool, white knuckles. “Mademoiselle.”

Eddie opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, Richie continues—

“Wait a minute! You’re growing your arm back! It’s a miracle! How long until you grow the skin?”

“It’s for the kids!” Eddie shrieks with laughter, and it’s a sound Richie wants to hear every day for the rest of his life. “We’ve been getting a lot of trick or treaters. I thought I could do something fun.”

“I’ll say. Any chance we could use this in the bedroom?”

“If you were serious, I _might_ think about it.”

Richie gives an exaggerated pout, and Eddie bends down to kiss it off of him. Richie’s just getting to taste the remnants of the Skittles in Eddie’s molars when the doorbell rings. With his bowl of candy, Eddie jumps up to answer it.

Richie watches as Eddie squats down to talk to the group of kids at eye level, lets each of them take as much candy as they want from the bowl, and even lets a little girl examine his skeleton arm; and Richie knows, loving Eddie somehow even more with the realization, that if he and Eddie ever adopted—or even tried IVF, because if Ben and Beverly managed to break the curse, then maybe Richie and Eddie could, too—Eddie would be the best dad in the world.  


* * *

  
It’s ten o’clock when Eddie makes an executive decision to turn off the outdoor lights and call it a night. He sets the bowl of candy on the kitchen table and Richie meets him there, with the empty containers from the Thai food they had delivered.

Richie rinses out the plastic containers and puts them in the recycling bin, watching from the corner of his eye as Eddie opens a small chocolate bar wrapper with his teeth and pops it into his mouth. “How many of those have you eaten?” Richie asks.

Eddie just shrugs, melting instantly into Richie when Richie winds his arms with practiced ease around Eddie’s waist. Their lips meet, and Richie can taste the chocolate.

“Sweet,” Richie murmurs.

“Me or the candy?”

“Both. Mostly you. I love you.”

“Love you, too,” Eddie mumbles, going in for another kiss, but Richie pulls away because he still isn’t done with the skeleton arm.

He raises it to his mouth, channeling Gomez Addams, and kisses each plastic finger before moving up the arm, kissing it through Eddie’s shirt sleeve. The arm rattles with Eddie’s laughter, and when Richie’s lips finally meet the yielding flesh of Eddie’s upper arm through his shirt, Eddie sighs contentedly and murmurs, “Rich.”

Richie goes from Eddie’s shoulder to his neck, thinking of Dracula, capturing Eddie in his arms and trailing delicate kisses up the side of his neck. When he attacks Eddie’s pulse point with a biting kiss, Eddie moans—Richie knows just what neck kisses do to Eddie, and he didn’t do it by accident. “Rich,” Eddie whines, again. “Take me to bed?”

And so they tumble upstairs—and if Richie could have carried Eddie, he would, but he’s too old for that—to the master bedroom that Richie used to sleep in alone, until Eddie came back into his life three years ago.  


* * *

  
They don’t end up using the skeleton arm—until after, when they’re fresh out of the shower, and Richie uses it to bat gently at Eddie’s face and comb through his towel-dried hair.

“Hey!” Eddie squeals, swatting it away. Richie sets it back on the nightstand, opting instead to wrap his arms around Eddie and haul him close. Eddie makes himself comfortable, head on the pillow of Richie’s chest, their bare legs interlocked.

Richie runs his decidedly non-skeletal fingers through Eddie’s hair for a few minutes, then asks the question that’s been on his mind all night. “You ever think about having kids?”

Eddie’s hand comes up to cover his mouth as he yawns. “I don’t think we can make a baby like that, Rich.”

“I’m serious.”

Eddie looks up at Richie with gentle realization. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Richie wants to give Eddie an explanation, but the only one he can come up with is, “I think you’d be a good dad.”

Eddie lays his head back down against Richie’s chest and goes silent. Richie knows Eddie well enough to know that Eddie’s deep in thought, and he plays with Eddie’s hair until he’s done.

“I’m scared to screw it up,” Eddie says, finally. _“Like my ma did to me”_ goes unsaid, but Richie gets it.

“You wouldn’t screw it up. You’re great with kids.”

“I don’t know, Rich.”

“I’m scared to screw it up, too,” Richie says. “But even if I did, I think our kid would turn out okay, ‘cause of you.”

“You do?” Eddie shifts to lay his head on the pillow next to Richie’s, looking at Richie with softened brown eyes.

“Yeah, Eds. I do.”

Eddie’s silent for a moment. “Your parents were nice,” he offers. Richie knows what he means—_“I like the person you are; we could do what they did.”_

“Yeah,” Richie muses. “They were.”

“Maybe…” Eddie says, softly. “Maybe we could babysit Elfie a little more and see how it goes.”

Ben and Bev’s daughter Elfrida—named after Bev’s late mother—is squarely in the middle of her terrible twos, and Richie loves her, but the thought of babysitting her now still makes him flinch.

“It’s a deal,” Richie says. “Smart, too. Think of all the favors they’d owe us.”

Eddie laughs, and it puts the warmth suddenly back in Richie’s chest. “Hey, Richie?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“God, Eds,” Richie sighs, holding back tears, “you have no idea how much I love you.”

“I do,” Eddie whispers with a gentle smile.

“Yeah,” Richie concedes, “you do. You think I could love a kid that much?”

Eddie kisses Richie, and it’s the sweetest feeling in the world. “I know you could.”

**Author's Note:**

> [hit me up on tumblr!](http://geislieb.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [won't you please take my hand? [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23120740) by [queermccoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queermccoy/pseuds/queermccoy)


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